Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret Harte and

Transcription

STEPHANIE C. PALMER
Travel Delays in the
Commercial Countryside with
Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett
I
1869, B R E T H A R T E P U B L I S H E D "Miggles" i n the Overland
Monthly. In this story, a washed-out bridge obliges stagecoach passengers and employees to spend a stormy night in the Sierra Mountain
home of a former prostitute. A n 1895 issue of the Atlantic Monthly included Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Life of Nancy," a story that focuses on
the lifelong but intermittent friendship between a Harvard socialite
and a young woman from a coastal Maine fishing-farming community.
The events of Jewett's story begin when the Harvard man stays beyond
the hunting and fishing season as a city boarder i n the young woman's
family farmhouse because his friend is nursing an ankle injury. Both local color stories bring about interactions between local and traveling
characters with the literary device of a weary and unexpectedly halted
traveler, a device that suggests disruption, anomaly, and something
vaguely old fashioned. Despite the device's outworn feel, it is actually
shorthand for a local and translocal history. By using this device, Harte
and Jewett reflect on the changes in the cultures and economies of the
places where they became adults and began to write. By weaving the
device into their fiction in the way that they do, they work to correct
some of the inaccurate and offensive stories about those places repeated
by the increasingly numerous travelers, tourists and members of the
travel industry moving to or through those places.1 They narrate a history that allows for sociability and tenuous respect between social
groups who were often in conflict in the course of their lifetimes. Their
N
Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents
ISSN 0004-1610
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Stephanie C. Palmer
use of this device deserves a more supple reading than local color naration has typically received in literary criticism and American Studies.
Early and mid twentieth-century literary historians tended to treat
local color literature as a natural response to existing diversity within
the United States, a passive reflection of different places, cultural groups,
histories, and geographies.2 A scholar working from this assumption is
unlikely to attribute any history these stories tell to an individual author's creativity or perspicacity. Late twentieth-century writers and
scholars argue that most nineteenth-century local color writers tell a
version of history that is in retrospect unacceptable because the writers'
relatively elite backgrounds led them to be nostalgic or, worse, racist
and classist.3 For example, in his introduction to an edition of Harte's
stories, Wallace Stegner apologizes for the inaccuracy of Harte's depiction of the gold rush (viii-x), and in Tripmaster Monkey (1989) Maxine
Hong Kingston rejects Harte as a precursor because of Harte's racist
portrayal of A h Sin (9-10). In comparison to Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett
receives critical acclaim, but usually not for the way she depicts historical change. Scholars fault her for hiding the historical presence of
tourism and industrialism in Maine.4 Or they apply arguably limiting
theories of history to Jewett's work. For example, Richard Brodhead
and Sandra Zagarell argue that Jewett scholars should focus on her affiliation with the Northeastern cultural elite and its symbolic and material control over poorer regions and countries, because in Jewett's day
this power was overwhelmingly influential in fiction and national
affairs. A few scholars dispute this directive. While agreeing with
Zagarell and Brodhead that Jewett privileges elite values, June Howard
shows how Jewett's " A Late Supper" weaves together the nineteenthcentury ideal of hospitality with modern knowledge of the stock market. This combination of temporalities is not Jewett's naive reading of
her own historical moment, argues Howard, but a sense of history as a
process not so easily segmented into periods. Jacqueline Shea Murphy
argues that the focus on the interests of the Northeastern elite in Jewett's fiction wrongly assumes that this power was uncontested in Jewett's time and continues to be so today, and she shows how Jewett's
work did not prevent Abenaki Indians from telling other stories about
Maine even during Jewett's lifetime. Murphy, like Patricia Nelson Limerick and Elsa Barkley Brown, works from a de-centered theory of history, in which, in Brown's words, "History . . . is everybody talking at
Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside
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once" and "The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events" (274).
In this article I argue that there are signs of the contest and conversations between different historical groups in the stories "Miggles" and
"The Life of Nancy." I also argue that readers can read these stories and
other writings by Harte to de-center the histories of California and
Maine, to wrest away a degree of control from the centralizing and organizing forces of economic development. 1 will show that Harte and
Jewett wrote from a local perspective, that of local cultural arbiters, not
a perspective granted much overt attention i n literary criticism or
American Studies. They represent history in an active manner, i n a
way that is neither nostalgic for a putatively conflict-free past nor always evasive of the writers' trans-local, commercial present.
I. T R A V E L , R E G I O N A L E C O N O M I E S ,
A N D E M E R G E N C Y H O S P I T A L I T Y STORIES
The stories become readable as optimistic but not inaccurate stories
about historical change when one considers them next to the specific
changes in regional economies that occurred from the 1850s to the
1890s. In the course of these decades, the cultures and economies of
New England and California were dramatically reshaped by changes i n
tourism, travel, and economic development that modified the way that
travelers interacted with local residents.5 Migrants, business travelers,
and tourists continued to stop unannounced at private homes, as they
had done throughout the European settling of the American continent.
But for the first time i n the continent's history, they did so in the context of many other options. A s historians of nineteenth-century tourism have conclusively demonstrated, travel became speedier and more
commercial during the century.6 For eating, sleeping, or resting, travelers relied decreasingly on local people and increasingly on translocal
corporations, travel agents, government agencies, and travel guides.
The wealthiest travelers were able to choose between different levels of
cost and comfort. Elite hotels, with private rooms, private washrooms,
and increased personal services, were built i n new cities and tourist destinations, modeled after the Tremont Hotel in Boston (established
1829) and the Astor House in New York (established 1834) (Yoder 80).
Or travelers could stay in lower-priced hotels, boarding houses, or tent
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cities. O n trains and steamboats travelers had always been separated by
race, class, and family status, and by the end of the 1880s, non-black
and non-Chinese travelers with money chose between eating and
sleeping in the luxury Palace Pullman cars or cooking their own food in
the Tourist Pullman cars, which were equipped with stoves and ice
chests (Fifer 327-33). Thus, for the first time i n U.S. history, travel
hindered rather than fostered interactions between travelers of different classes and between travelers and people outside the travel-service
industry.
Modernization happened unevenly across the country, but as soon as
luxury accommodations or transpoftation choices were available in a
specific location, travelers who could afford to use them did so. Thus
on a local level modernization was swift and seemingly irrevocable. Local business people were forced to adjust. People who previously made
money by doing travelers' laundry, cooking their meals, or transporting
them by stage had to cooperate with refined and efficient competitors
who were quickly and powerfully changing the rules of the trade. For
example, according to the traveler W . G . Marshall, a local man in
Yosemite was forced by the large hotels to remove his sign advertising
laundry services from one of the area's viewpoints (343-44). W h e n the
man discussed the event with Marshall, the man speculated that the
park officials were interested not only in preserving the natural view
but also i n keeping competing businesses at bay.7
While these changes in regional economies were occurring, people
changed the stories they told about hospitality. They began to focus on
the newly antiquated feel of spontaneous, bartered hospitality. Suddenly instances in which travelers received assistance, food, or shelter
from people outside the travel industry felt unusually human and warm.
Throughout the century, narratives of emergency hospitality appeared
widely: in pioneer diaries, in travel literature of the elite and middle
classes, and i n genteel American or European fiction. In the 1830s, entering the home or "crude" inn of a stranger was something that travelers and tourists did when alternative accommodations were not available, as did Caroline Kirkland and Margaret Fuller in their trips to the
Great Lakes region in 1837 and 1843 respectively. Although writers
mention the incident, they do not always remark upon it at length. 8
But by the 1850s, the act was both a practical activity and a meaningful
piece of supposedly authentic experience worth fantasizing about be-
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forehand and narrating afterward, as it was to Albert Richardson in his
travels as a reporter through the Great Plains—in one incident, after
taking shelter i n an Indian cabin on a stormy night, he returned with
his wife so that she could experience the Indians' hospitality first hand. 9
By the end of the 1860s, such visits i n most parts of the United States
were ready candidates for intense and unique experience.
Emergency hospitality stories reflect on the possibility of egalitarian
and unscripted moments within a travel culture that is otherwise hierarchical and formulaic.10 They suggest that human interactions coexist
with market transactions, sometimes even in the present day. T h e
ideological potential of such stories is mixed and can be co-opted for
different purposes by different authors and audiences. Some stories emphasize that kindness can occur in the present time in spite of economic inequality, and others shore up readers' sense of themselves as
modern and distinct from the quaint accommodations and people of
the past. In the specific cultural location in which Harte's and Jewett's
stories were first published, arts and letters magazines too expensive for
most middle- and lower-class people to buy, the message of the writers'
superior modernity became the more prevalent.11 Stories of unplanned
visits with lower-class locals appeared, albeit infrequently, in similar
magazines between the 1860s and the 1890s. In 1870, the Atlantic
Monthly published a story, M . Edward Brown's " A Winter Adventure
on the Prairie," i n which four day trippers drive a horse to death, run
from Indians, and spend the night in a cabin of a French-Indian family.
The traveling party consists of residents of a prairie town and their female friend from the East, who serves as the story's narrator. Bridging
two publishing fields, this story resembles those narrated in overland
diaries and fiction as well as those published in the high literary monthlies; the death of a horse would have been a major financial blow for
prairie residents, and the night sleeping on a mixed-race family's floor
would have registered as a foray into barbarism for many middle-class
people, including those who lived on the prairies. The story is witty,
with the narrator expressing resignation to the moment rather than
fear of humiliation or pride i n her own ability to endure.12 In 1871, the
pages of Harper's Monthly included a quaint old man who invited tourists into his home on the outskirts of Key West (Holder), and in 1875
the magazine printed a story about a group of sport fishermen who spent
a pleasant night i n a rude backcountry hotel on the Maine-Canadian
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border (Ward). In these later stories the device of emergency hospitality serves as a moment of novelty, a way to market stories as more authentic to a real locale outside of the standardizing forces of mass
tourism. Writes the traveler who visited the old man in Key West, "We
are fond of these choice bits of living pictures" (Holder 314). Premised
on readers' sense that sleeping on the floor means crisis, discomfort, and
danger, the latter stories build readers' sense of themselves as modern
and cosmopolitan because they are able to tolerate unpleasantness with
the knowledge that it will not last forever. Yet emergency hospitality
stories of any stripe did not overtake the pages of the arts and letters
monthlies; lest one overstate their appeal for the cultural elite, one
should remember that Henry James's character Lydia Touchett i n The
Portrait of a Lady (1881) dislikes all American hotels, much less the
backcountry ones.
A n d to read all emergency hospitality stories solely from the travelers' perspectives is to reassert the supremacy of the late nineteenthcentury cultural elite. Harte and Jewett emphasize i n their emergency
hospitality stories that such events were instances in which travelers
bump up against competing modern realities, against people who are as
modern as themselves, albeit in different ways.13 They at once encourage readers to think about the possibility of friendly acts between
strangers and remind readers of the social antipathy that made such
friendliness difficult i n real life. A s I will explain in the following sections, in opposing ways, the stories can help scholars understand the relationship between local color writers and historical change like the
oncoming of tourism and between local color writers and the feminine.
The stories illustrate the in-between role of local color fiction writers in
the telling of a national history, and they are especially notable because
they do not obscure the feminine work of feeding and caring for others.
II. H A R T E A N D " F R O N T I E R . " H O S P I T A L I T Y
In some of the newspaper sketches that Harte wrote before he left
California, he strives to occupy a middle position between California
residents and newcomers from the East or elsewhere. In the process he
de-centers tourism by telling readers that some of the regional people
are literary types, too, and that there are places worth visiting other
than Yosemite or the Sequoia Trees, like the Santa Clara valley, or, in
"Miggles," the cabin of a single woman who manages to take care of a
disabled man. The newspaper sketches are set in Harte's own present,
and "Miggles" retells a story of the past in a way that reveals respectable
men's hypocrisy about sex outside marriage.
Harte's story of stagecoach passengers who spend a night in a "frontier" home relies upon a history and mythology of road travel and backcountry accommodations. Before the railroad, road travel by foot,
horseback, or horse-drawn vehicle was legendarily difficult. It exposed
travelers to weather, terrain, and the volatile wills of animals and people. Travelers had to stop often and randomly. They relied on networks
of settlers, traders, missionaries, and Indians (Limerick 38-41; Unruh
268). Private families and innkeepers alike took on extra roles in times
of need. They regularly cared for guests who were ill, and they sometimes served as physicians or undertakers in the absence of alternatives
(Yoder 33-34). Even elite travelers like Margaret Fuller accepted help
from humble farmers and Indians.
These aspects of road travel and backcountry accommodations fed
the ideal known then and now as "frontier hospitality," in which different social groups in sparsely settled areas freely provided guidance, supplies, and shelter to travelers in boundless and spontaneous ways.14 The
actual experience of individual travelers and residents behind the ideal
has been much debated. Scholars who emphasize social conflict as well
as consensus have shown that class, ethnic, and sexual friction abounded
in real frontier hospitality. Paton Yoder has documented that even inns
in developing areas were run by managers working under absentee owners, a fact that should modify fantasies of salt-of-the-earth folk who care
for strangers out of the goodness of their hearts (6, 13,9). Travelers and
hosts from different ethnic groups or political parties were sometimes
friendly to each other and sometimes hostile, and many genteel travelers had to work hard not to be openly disgusted by the hygienic standards of roadside taverns.
The seventeen-year-old Bret Harte arrived in Oakland, California in
1854, at the tail end of a "boom." The gold rush had recently brought
large quantities of Eastern money, luxury hotels, construction, and people to the San Francisco bay and the Sierra Nevadas. Born in Albany
and raised mostly in New York City, Harte was part of that influx, and
by most accounts, an outsider in long-term residents' eyes.15 Granted,
he served briefly as a stagecoach expressmen, and in the 1850s he
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recuperated in the cabin of miner Jim Gillis for four days, thus experiencing frontier hospitality first hand (Nissen 43-44). He also lived on a
ranch and in Uniontown, a town offivehundred people—not as blacksmith or farmer, producing things those communities would have valued, but as tutor and printer's assistant. In the words of Harte biographer Alex Nissen, "Frank [Bret] Harte would emphatically not do in the
eyes of the 'rougher element,' as contemporary witnesses attest. . . . As
a young man in Oakland, Uniontown, and San Francisco, Frank Harte
was never one of the boys" (54). Instead Harte followed his personal
desires and worked to become an artist, a writer. Although Richard
Brodhead emphasizes the elite dimension of some local color writers'
backgrounds and argues that their writing furthers the interests of the
elite, Harte was born in a middling state. He came from a family that
valued book learning but lacked the money and status to afford him a
comfortable life as a writer. So he searched for work. He was discovered
and befriended by San Francisco cultural leaders Thomas Starr King
and Jessie Fremont, who introduced him to local editors and helped
him secure work as a clerk in various government offices. He wrote and
edited for local and national papers, and after he married in 1862, his
wife augmented the family income by singing in a church choir (Stewart 140). The Harte family lived in increasingly fashionable houses, and
by 1865, it was possible for them to take vacations in the Santa Clara
countryside (Stewart 173).
Unlike Jewett, Harte initially aspired to be a writer of universal
rather than local subject matter, and he seems to have been drawn into
writing about California through market pressure. In the decade when
Harte began writing, San Francisco's literati and businessmen were taking an interest in the gold rush and Spanish California as the state's
"past," a past that they could market as part of California's unique identity and yet assure its passing by attracting the railroad and outside investors. A Sacramento newspaper criticized Harte in 1865 for editing a
volume of California verse that included no poems with local subject
material (Nissen 81). Yet the sketches he published in this period discuss a range of local topics, both urban and rural: a San Francisco bank
explosion, memories of the city's defunct German beer garden, a flood
in a country village, the social types of a Western stage, and the intrigue of a night-time stageride.16 These sketches deal with small-scale
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interactions between the people of California "past" and California
"present." They also reveal Harte's in-between subject location.
In Harte's newspaper work, he placed himself as an observer of both
the emerging elite and the established agrarians. "In the Country,"
(1865) a sketch published in The Californian, a San Francisco-based literary journal, marks an upper and a lower class and leaves unmarked a
bohemian middle ground, from which the authorial persona speaks.
Describing a country place along the route of fashionable travel, the
sketch expresses regret over the destructive influx of economic development. But it also codes local rural people as tragically barbaric:
There was something peculiarly Californian in the occasional
odd juxtaposition of civilization and barbarism. . . . Yet in the
midst of this wilderness, a turn in the rough mountain trail
brings you suddenly upon a vision of smoothly-shaven faces,
pork-pie hats, bright dresses, ribbons and light-colored gloves,
in a smart rockaway, drawn by well-groomed horses with shining harness. Perhaps a few yards further on you meet the indigenous oxteam, toiling along with its load of rails, preceded
by the teamster, unshaven and unshorn, looking as if he might
in time so closely assimilate to his oxen as to change places
with them. Such is the influence of civilization, however, that
it is the ox team which seems the intruder. The teamster recognizes the fact as he turns out of the way to let you pass.
(16-17)
Harte's persona is not equidistant from the ox driver and the pork-pie
hats. T h e interest i n the details of the excursionists' dress and the attitude toward the ox driver, as well as the assurance that the ox driver is
a member of a "vanishing race," place Harte's unmarked middle ground
closer to the ground of the wealthy city people. In spite of erratic finances throughout his life, he exemplifies the disposition that Bourdieu
associates with the artist as a dominated member of a dominant class
(Bourdieu 33-34, 37-40). Although he narrates another scene in which
a well-dressed horseman imperiously orders him off a plot of land, he
ridicules local residents who fail to answer his questions for directions
along the minor roads:
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Stephanie C. Palmer
[The] effect of a question upon the rural mind was similar to a
blow. After the first stunning effect was over, recovery was followed by the attitude of resistance. W h e n an answer could be
extracted from these people, it was usually given i n a vague,
unsatisfactory manner . . . There were allusions to such land
marks as Jones' M i l l , Brown's Store and Robinson's Field—
local authorities of course utterly unknown to the stranger.
(17-18)
Here he is teased by the locals no differently than an excursionist might
be, and he sounds humiliated. T h e speaker's earlier attempt to dominate the locals might stem from the fear of such humiliation. Thus
scholars should read Harte as between rather than affiliated with either
the uncultured locals or the excursionists, but in a way that forces him
into moral complicity with the economic changes that were benefiting
the comfortable middle class and elite. T h e very journal i n which the
sketch was published had higher cultural aspirations than any other
previous San Francisco venture, and "ironically, its very existence was
made possible by the increased wealth, luxury, and spirit of materialism
that the paper would disparage i n its columns" (Nissen 77).
Harte tried to argue that he was a better source of information about
California than the N e w England and European tourists whose travel
narratives, lithographic plates, and photographs were being published
worldwide. In a letter Harte wrote as the California correspondent for
the Massachusetts Springfield Republican, he locates himself in his own
retreat of the Santa Clara Valley, a valley closer to San Francisco, and
thus less expensive to visit, than the world-famous tourist destinations
of Shasta, Yosemite, or the Sequoia Trees, which Harte calls "the heroics of California scenery" (131). A s he strolls through the local lowlevel bureaucrats' summer retreat, he explains why wealthy tourists
find Californians impassive and ignorant. It is because the tourists act
so silly and hysterical about the scenery: "It is not pleasant to have people around you falling into spasms of admiration and enthusiasm after
an hour's acquaintance with things you think you have thoroughly
comprehended and which you admire—if at all—with a judicious
calmness" (133). A s someone who can view Sequoia trees with such
composure, he understands that there is good reason for "the halfsuperciliousness and ill-disguised scorn which characterize most guides"
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(133). Sympathizing with one's guides rather than with one's fellow
tourists was common among self-identified cosmopolitan travelers.
Guides were usually young locals who hired themselves out to help
tourists up mountains or through caves. Many wealthy tourists resented
guides' impudence, but like Harte before him, Rudyard Kipling, literally on the proverbial Cook's tour (Fifer 205), preferred them to Daisy
Miller-like tourists who were increasingly populating the American
tourist routes (Kipling 76-112). By sympathizing with guides, Harte is
saying that he can lead people through California in an authentic and
learned way. More so than the Harper's Monthly writer who claims to be
fond of "these choice bits of living pictures," Harte sought to individualize himself with a unique travel experience that separates him from
less experienced travelers. James Buzard calls such efforts at traveler i n dividuality a sign of a writer's degree of acculturation to his increasing
cultural status.17 This was surely the case with Harte, but this particular
move is also a bargain with necessity; Harte had to write about a California that Massachusetts readers will recognize even though the California he knows is different, so he praises the California he knows to
make himself feel better.
In the story "Miggles," written i n California, soon after Harte was
invited to become editor of the newly created Overland Monthly,
Harte's in-between persona is evident in the form of a well-spoken narrator who views both the stagecoach driver and a garrulous judge from
some distance. Like the sketches, it details small-scale negotiations
between California "past" and California "present." The story creates a
temporary community comprised of the narrator/passenger, a stagecoach driver (the famous Harte character Yuba Bill), an expressman, a
judge, a genteel couple from Virginia City, a traveler from the Washoe
region of Nevada, a French lady, an Irishman who rides on the roof, the
former prostitute Miggles, her paralyzed lover Jim, her tamed bear, and
her pet magpie.18 It would have been highly unlikely for such a group to
interact without serious tension in an actual western public establishment, before or after the railroad. Actual frontier hospitality was human in its prejudice and pettiness as well as its sympathy and humor. So
Harte's decision to make this community a pleasant one is an act of defiance. The story suggests that people from different social groups can
coexist peacefully even if they do not usually get along.
The story narrates a shift in reader/traveler expectation from hostil-
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ity to cooperation. The first lines detail the atomizing dreariness of
American travel complained about by many travel writers of the day.19
Although the passengers and driver are physically crowded in the stagecoach, they are metaphysically isolated. They sit in silence during a
jolting eight miles, and the ladies fade into an anonymity, a "wild confusion of ribbons, veils, furs, and shawls" (37). The rest of the narrative
works to undo this anonymity.
The next lines encourage readers to view the turn of events as a
challenge to the characters. Readers think suspense and the unknown;
the passengers catch only snatches of the shouted exchange between
the driver and a horseman who relays the news "bridge gone," "twenty
feet of water," "can't pass," and "Try Miggles," and they wonder aloud to
each other about the identity of the person with such a strange name
(37-38). Once they arrive at a barred and boarded gate, the decision of
what to do next becomes a battle of class styles between the driver and
the expressman on the one side and the judge on the other. The driver
Yuba Bill's strategy of violently penetrating the gate follows the code of
rough masculinity associated throughout the nineteenth century with
the lower classes (Bederman 17-19). A t first, his strategy appears the
more productive. Bill calls into the gate forcefully and orders the passengers to do the same. They are answered by what sounds like a belligerent male voice, and Bill assumes that a man inside is challenging
him. Meanwhile, the judge calls toward the house to kindly "consider
the inhospitality of refusing shelter from the inclemency of the weather
to helpless females," a line whose gentility is rendered ridiculous when
it too is answered by the belligerent male voice (40). It is only when
Bill walks into the building, shines his lantern in the eyes of a wrinkled
man, and tips him over that the party discovers that the man is paralyzed: "To our great dismay, as Bill removed his hand, the venerable
stranger apparently collapsed—sinking into half his size and an undistinguishable heap of clothing" (41). They soon realize that the belligerent male voice was an echo of their own from the beak of the magpie.
The significance of these realizations is that when they dismantle the
only visible man of the household, Bill's anticipation of rough challenge
becomes irrelevant. Obviously, no one in the cabin wishes them harm.
Rather than choosing the aggressive masculine script, Harte chooses
to make the characters work together in a semblance of harmony. He is
less subverting all literary convention for once and all time than choos-
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ing a literary convention that suits his purpose. T h e judge's middleclass self-control and penchant for quoting poetry help to an extent, as
he directs the men i n sitting the figure back up i n his chair before the
fire. But it is Miggles who brings the group into a difficult state of sociability, assistance, and discretion. Once she appears, her presence encourages the passengers to change their habitual ways of interacting
with people. First, they are shocked that the odd name "Miggles" refers
to a woman. Coming i n from the rain, Miggles sprays them with raindrops, drops a hairpin while fixing her hair, and asks them to help her
pick it up. The ladies shrink from her comfort with the situation;
women who worked in, managed, or owned public establishments were
in danger of being considered "loose" (Johnson "Bed and Board"). But
at her request, the men of the party (from the judge to the expressman)
help Miggles grind the coffee, build the fire, and slice the bacon. A l l
present from the judge and the French lady to Yuba Bill and Miggles sit
down at the table together to eat. The point of this scene is that human
interactions can continue in a relatively peaceful manner despite serious social antagonism.
This social antagonism is not swept away in the writer's attempt to
portray the social groups in question as less harmful to each other than
they actually were i n history. T h e Irish passenger has to ride on the roof
in transit even though he rooms with the rest of them in this extraordinary circumstance. The genteel ladies of the party never quite accept
Miggles, and the male writer Harte never renders them much less
anonymous than they are in the opening scene. They are sent to sleep
in a side room before Miggles explains the reason for her cohabitation
with Jim—she left the Polka saloon for her lover and client who was
suddenly struck by paralysis—a piece of her life story which serves as
the story's climax. Harte's most recent biographer Alex Nissen has
found evidence that Harte was willing to speak out on the behalf of Indians, Chinese, and Jews in his editorials for various newspapers, and
he has argued convincingly that Harte's "Plain Language from Truthful
James" was intended to and actually did prompt contemporary readers
to question their habitual distrust of the Chinese (27-30, 55-56, 7576, I O Q - I I ) . But the narrator/passenger most similar to Harte writes as
if the lower status characters are lower on an evolutionary track: Jim
is an "invertebrate," Yuba Bill "growl[s]" and his devotion to Miggles
makes h i m a Caliban to her Miranda (41, 43, 45).
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Furthermore, the burden of mollifying the fragile community is displaced onto a woman, and even more predictably, a "loose" woman. In
nearly all North American cultures, the work of feeding and caring for
strangers went to women whenever women were around. In Susan Lee
Johnson's analysis of the domestic life of the Gold Rush diggings, male
miners had to cook and clean for themselves. But many men, particularly white N o r t h Americans or Englishmen, likened themselves at
these tasks to white women at home or gendered other races female
when they considered such work easier for the supposedly neat Chinese
or culinary French. In the more organized context of the Great Plains
in the 1850s, Albert Richardson accepted food and sleeping quarters
from men and women. But when Mexican, Indian, or white woman
were around, they did the cooking, and often they did not eat with the
rest of the party. Granted, being the one household around with the resources for housing strangers gave members of that household status—
they got the news first, and they maintained temporary control over
where the travelers went and what they knew. Some women probably
enjoyed this opportunity, even though it came with strings attached.
To Harte's credit, though, the story encourages readers to see that getting people to be friendly is feminine, thankless work. It is clearly
Miggles' discretion and her ability to win over the men of the party that
makes it possible for the party to coexist; it is her role to charm the
men, appease the ladies, and protect her powerless lover. The narrator
highlights the fact that Miggles bears a burden no one else shares:
The meal was a culinary success. But more, it was a social triumph—chiefly, I think, owing to the rare tact of Miggles in
guiding conversation, asking all the questions herself, yet bearing throughout a frankness that rejected the idea of any concealment on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, our
prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other—of
everything but our host and hostess. (46)
Relative peaceful coexistence would not be possible without Miggles'
ability to appear frank yet be discreet.
In this way the story does not simply shore up traveler-readers' sense
of self or comfortable fantasies of the W i l d West. It does not provide a
depiction of a woman boarding house proprietor from a woman boarding house proprietor's point of view. The story does, though, raise issues
85
of gender, sexuality, and class that other literary fiction of its decade
(and the next two decades) does not. Miggles makes it clear that she
thinks some of the polite men i n the room might have used her services
when she was a prostitute. Suddenly she asks, "Is there any of you that
knows me?" and when the answer is no she exclaims, "Think again! I
lived i n Marysville in '53. Everybody knew me there, and everybody
had the right to know me" (50). In the fictional mise en scene, the ladies
are not present. But actual ladies read the story. So the story is a safe but
potent way for Harte to point to respectable society's hypocrisy about
prostitution and cohabitation.
The story "Miggles" hides the commercial nature of the interaction
between Miggles and the stagecoach passengers: it was likely that travelers would have paid someone who took them into her home, or at
least offered to pay her (Yoder), but in the story there is no discussion of
payment. N o r is there any hint that i n the 1850s and '60s, nearly every
traveler to California was also a tourist, interested in the pleasure of the
experience and following to some extent a beaten track.
III. J E W E T T A N D T H E
LIFELONG SUMMER BOARDER
Unlike "Miggles," "The Life of Nancy" comments directly on what
commercialized travel has done to the place the author knew well and
suggests that human interactions can coexist with commercial transactions into the present day. The story makes a number of subtle moves
that counter the typical gender and space politics of emergency hospitality stories and other urban-rural stories of the age. While most emergency hospitality stories depict friendships that are temporary, Jewett
imagines what might happen if a friendship begun with emergency
hospitality lasted a lifetime. While most emergency hospitality stories
depict a mildly battered and temporarily immobilized traveler, she contrasts the Harvard socialite's sprained ankle to the major immobilization of rheumatism which confines the village woman to her family's
farmhouse. The story's premise is social-sexual betrayal: the power imbalance and cultural differences between the Harvard socialite (Tom
Aldis) and the village woman (Nancy Gale) never leave readers' attention. For instance, the story makes clear that the rheumatism of Nancy's
adulthood grows severe because she lacks access to the first-rate med-
86
ical help a city woman might secure. Yet rather than turn Nancy into a
case study of provincial hardship, a case study that might merely assure
readers of their own mobility, Jewett encourages readers to view Nancy
as a spiritually strong counterpoint to the city; the title phrase "the life
of" makes the story something of a hagiography.
Jewett writes about changes to travel, tourism, and hospitality in a
different context from Harte's, the New England village. By the time of
Jewett's birth, N e w Englanders were beginning to recognize that "progress" was moving elsewhere, in part to Harte's country in the West. T h e
traditional industries were not growing, and residents and government
officials saw leisure tourism as an appealing economic option. Unlike
California, where many of the prospective travelers to whom Harte was
writing came with the intention of settling down or investing in a new
economy, people came to N e w England to relax or invest in private or
public vacation property. By the 1860s, as Dona Brown has shown
(150), the summer vacation had become available not only to artists or
the wealthy but also to schoolteachers, ministers, and shopkeepers.
This new class of tourists was more likely than wealthy tourists to use
inexpensive accommodations, and so the long-standing practice of taking in boarders turned into a formal business. Farming families began
reading government publications and advertising in the newspapers to
find ways to attract city families to their homes. Although city boarders
were often demanding, ignorant, or condescending, they paid cash,
which enabled farming families to enter the cash economy more effectively than they could with farming alone. Moreover, it was usually the
women's task to care for these city dwellers, and some women maintained individual control over this extra income. Jewett dated the first
summer boarders i n her hometown of South Berwick, Maine, to the
mid 1860s (Weber and Weber viii-ix). Thus in New England when the
story was written, people did not only stop at private homes i n times of
emergency or need, they were expected and planned for, and they paid
an arranged fee. T h e relationship between host and boarder was i n this
sense overtly commercial.
"The Life of Nancy" depicts these changes in N e w England tourism
in precise detail. T h e Bostonian character Tom Aldis visits East Rodney, Maine twice in the story. In the first visit, he is a student, accompanied by his student friend Carew, who plans to spend the summer
hunting and fishing near his father's property. Tom and Carew stay as
paying guests in the Gale family farmhouse. This visit might take place
around 1868. The second visit is twenty years later, when Tom is a married businessman planning to sell his father's property in East Rodney;
this time, Tom stays in a grand hotel owned by a man new to the village. Even though both grand hotels and homes that took in boarders
already existed in Maine in the 1860s, this shift symbolizes the tourist
industry's growth and sophistication.
During this shift, Jewett herself responded to tourism in contradictory ways. She once claimed that her motivation for writing stemmed
from a desire to defend Maine residents against insensitive and ignorant summer boarders. She wrote of this desire with a mixture of condescension and respect for Maine people:
the way they [the city boarders] misconstrued the country people and made game of their peculiarities fired me with indignation. I determined to teach the world that country people were
not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I
wanted the world to know their grand simple lives; and, so far
as I had a mission, when I first began to write, I think that was
it. (qtd. in Weber and Weber viii-ix)
Throughout her life, she defended the pleasures of living in Maine to
Boston friends who urged her to stay in Boston year round. Even Annie
Fields found South Berwick boring (Blanchard 90), and by the 1890s
Fields was Jewett's primary source of companionship and love. In 1893,
about the time she wrote "The Life of Nancy,"zo Jewett wrote privately
that tourism had become financially and spiritually valuable for both
New England and Eastern cities:
It has certainly been a great means of broadening both townsfolk and country folk. I think nothing has done so much for
New England in the last decade; it accounts for most of the enlargement and great gain that New England has certainly
made, as if there had been a fine scattering or sowing broadcast
of both thought and money! (Letter to F. M . Hopkins)
Jewett found appeal in both Berwick and Boston—she liked Berwick's
history and supposed coherence and Boston's intellectual stimulation,
adventure, and heterogeneity. Louis Renza (47-55) and Sandra Zagarell ("Troubling Regionalism") have interpreted this contradiction in
87
88
Jewett's thinking as a change over time, i n which Jewett eventually became sanguine about the problems that had initially inspired her to
write. But the second statement and "The Life of Nancy" suggest that
even in her maturity Jewett continued to hope that tourism could benefit many classes of N e w Englanders.
During Tom's first visit, his friend Carew injures his ankle, an event
that provides Tom and Carew with the excuse to stay beyond the hunting season. W h i l e Carew nurses the injury, Tom socializes with the local youth, including the popular Addie Porter and the respected Nancy
Gale. Unlike Jewett's urban friends, Tom is not bored; Nancy's dancing
is superlative, he thinks, "one of the most ideal things he had ever
known in his life; it would be hard to find elsewhere such grace as hers"
(15). Tom and Nancy Gale become so friendly that Tom sends her
Christmas presents and letters, and when Nancy visits Boston that winter, Tom accompanies her sightseeing. W h e n Tom returns to East Rodney twenty years later, he visits Nancy, long since bedridden by her
rheumatism. His appreciation of their friendship and Nancy's shrewd
advice convince h i m to make East Rodney his family's summer residence. A s a sign of their renewed friendship, a dirt path forms between
Nancy's farmhouse and Tom's estate.
Like the washed-out bridge i n Harte's story, Carew's sprained ankle
serves the purpose of bringing separated people into closer proximity so
that readers can neither deny nor take for granted the distinctions between those people. Carew's immobility enables Tom to interact with
the young people of East Rodney as a friend, not an upper-class outsider. Since there is no one to keep him company while hunting, Tom
joins the local youth i n activities unspoiled by mass culture like sailing,
haycart parties, prayer-meetings, sewing societies, and most memorably,
dancing in the schoolhouse hall and new barns. It is this change to
Tom's ordinary routine that makes possible his friendship with Nancy.
Jewett pushes this initial impetus into the background; Carew's ankle is
discussed only i n passing after we see Nancy and her uncle Ezra on their
trip to Boston. Thus the story nearly buries the ankle incident which, if
narrated in full, might prompt readerly sensations of disjunction and
danger; like Harte in "Miggles," Jewett considers a narrative of traveler
and male humiliation and chooses against it. This subtlety is typical of
the story's pushing away of conventional heterosexual scripts. T h e
travel delay and sporting injury were common devices i n popular and
89
high literary fiction of the 1880s and '90s for prodding active and
speedy urban figures into the leisurely realm of courtship. Typically, the
immobilized traveler was male and the nurturer was female; this fiction
perpetuated the idea that women were nurses rather than travelers i n
search of adventure or rejuvenation themselves (Garvey 106-34). I n
contrast, Jewett's story avoids the scene of nurture and healing; we
never see Nancy waiting on Carew at his bedside, serving Tom tea, or
even gathering herbs. Readers are never encouraged to visualize Nancy
in a service role.
Writing about these social types in this situation, Jewett could have
written a typical summer boarder romance, in which a wealthy city boy
attracts an innocent country girl only to betray her. Jewett avoids what
was a conventional plot of nineteenth-century fiction.20 T h e story
makes clear that Tom and Nancy fall a little bit in love when they first
meet. Together Tom and Nancy are electric: Tom "scurriefs]" down the
steps of his club to meet her, and they tour the city on "the fleetest and
lightest of feet," and "talked all the way" (313). Nancy wants to visit
Boston so that she can let Tom know that Addie never cared for him,
and while she is struggling to relay this information and its full import
to Tom, Tom thinks of his East Rodney "boyish gallantries" (presumably with Nancy and Addie) "with a little uneasiness" (12). It is his
feeling for Nancy that prevents Tom from revealing his near engagement to another girl. Yet they go their separate ways, remembering
each other until Tom's later visit, when the affection is rekindled (or
described as?) friendship. W h i l e Tom is married to a nameless, faceless
urban wife and is spiritually unhappy, Nancy is not married and, perhaps as a result, is the center of a community that relies on her for
teaching and the redrawing of school district lines. Thus the story suggests that the most permanent and satisfying of relationships is friendship, not marriage. To further diminish the importance of a "conjugal
plot," Addie Porter's flirting with Tom and the other boys has no serious
moral consequence for her or anyone else. Tom is uneasy when he remembers his "boyish gallantries," but he may read such socializing differently than a country girl would; i n these years country youth socialized more comfortably with the other sex than did city youth of any
class.20 A s an adult, Addie forgets Tom's place in her trail of broken
hearts, while Tom wistfully recalls his heady East Rodney flirtations.
East Rodney women are eminently capable of handling city men; sex
QO
Stephanie C. Palmer
emerges from tourism, but sex is not exclusively an arena of conflict for
New England girls.21
The story's style is designed around the potential for social/sexual
disconnection. Marcia McClintock Folsom has shown how Jewett's The
Country of the Pointed Firs has an "empathic style," in which the local
Mrs. Todd and the narrator, a city boarder in Mrs. Todd's home, understand each other even before they speak. But Nancy and Tom often
misunderstand each other, and the effect is dramatic irony, where the
author and the readers know something that Nancy or Tom does not
know. For Nancy, the trip to Boston is a wonderful experience that fulfills her dream of seeing first-rate dancing. For Tom, the visit is a delight, but a trial. H e does not enjoy waking up early to meet Nancy on
the morning after a Harvard assembly, and when Nancy asks h i m to
take her to dancing, he dreams up an excuse instead of accompanying
her to a lesson for children, the only dancing to be found so early in the
day. Nancy is available in the evening, as a matter of fact, since her
kind city cousins invite her to stay, but Tom feels the situation to be futile: he is "mindful of his own gay evening the night before, and of others to come, and the general impossibility of Nancy's finding the happiness she sought" (15). W e have already seen that Tom deceives Nancy
by not telling her about his engagement. Twenty years later, Tom walks
into East Rodney expecting people to remember him and to care about
the same things they did when they were young. But Addie does not remember him; the youth have new ways of entertaining themselves, and
Nancy is happier than he. His misrecognition of East Rodney renders
ironic his earlier thought about the impossibility of Nancy's happiness,
or his imperious condescension earlier in the story—"Tom had an intimate knowledge, gained from several weeks' residence, with Nancy's
whole world" ( n ) . T h e latter clause, which initially appears to be written in the third-person omniscient, as if Jewett is stating an objective
truth about Tom's ability to possess East Rodney, appears on a second
read to be Tom's indirect discourse. A s for Nancy, rather than chastising Tom for neglecting to write or never taking her to a real dancing
class, she speaks only of fond memories. W h e n he muses at Nancy's
bedside that he is reconsidering the decision to sell his land, one wonders whether Nancy's behavior is intended to help him decide i n the
way that is best for her.
The narrative structure emphasizes economic subtext. T h e third sec-
91
tion of the five part story, about Tom's return to East Rodney, is narrated from a third-person limited viewpoint. Tom and his male companion view the coast from an arriving steamer. They scrutinize the
shore for its property value: "The two passengers were on the watch for
landings and lookouts; in short, this lovely, lonely country was being
frankly appraised at its probable value for lumbering or for building-lots
and its relation to the real estate market" (22). Because of Nancy's
shrewd optimism, she plays a key role in the economic subplot. W h e n
Tom meets her at her bedside she never encourages him to feel guilty
for neglecting her; she even apologizes for not writing to him. Nancy's
ability to teach Tom how to be happy again is what encourages h i m to
change his plan to sell his East Rodney land. A s Tom muses about the
idea of building rather than selling, Nancy replies from an economic
standpoint. She remarks that his living in East Rodney would raise the
property value and therefore be a good investment for him and other
land speculators. Indeed, Tom's decision to heed her advice leads to a
small East Rodney boom: "It would be difficult to give any idea of the
excitement and interest of East Rodney, or the fine effect and impulse
to the local market" (39). In turn, Nancy receives a carrying chair,
which expands her social life and mobility.
Jewett has been faulted for hiding the commercial nature of Maine
country boarding by Elizabeth Ammons and Stephanie Foote. T h e famous friendship between the city narrator and Mrs. Todd of The Country of the Pointed Firs is, after all, a commercial one—the narrator is a
paying guest i n Mrs. Todd's home. T h e narrator is like Tom i n that she
is returning to a place she visited before in the hopes of recreating a
wonderful experience. Elizabeth Ammons is right to point out that the
repeated phrase "business" in descriptions of Mrs. Todd's home in the
opening lines of The Country of the Pointed Firs ideologically masks N e w
England's factories and bigger businesses.22 Such observations are important to keep in mind but misleadingly imply that boarding was not a
business. It could be, however, a very big business: the boarding houses
listed as private residences in railroad guides of the 1880s and 90s sometimes accommodated up to 10 to 20 people in as many as 13 guest
rooms.23 By representing boarding, Jewett is representing N e w England
business; i n "The Life of Nancy," she begins to hint at the economic dimension of that business, more than she does in The Country of the
Pointed Firs.
92
Stephanie C. Palmer
In the story, Nancy does not play the typical role of a provincial who
never travels, whose only knowledge and power are local. There is a
parallel between bedridden Nancy and paralyzed Jim in Harte's story;
an immobilized provincial is someone no traveling-reader wants to become. And as Sandra Zagarell has shown ("Troubling Regionalism"),
Jewett portrays the passing on of the older values of a local gentry to a
delegated readership of the "right sort" of urban elite. Just as Uncle Ezra
knew Tom's grandfather, Nancy passes on her older values—respect for
one's aunt, for instance—to Tom, the right sort of Boston businessman.
Jewett does indeed use the sprained ankle to reveal the difference between the gracious, cosmopolitan Tom and the weak, arrogant Carew.
Tom enjoys the local entertainment, because "he had known enough of
the rest of the world to appreciate the little community of fishermenfarmers" (n-12), while Carew turns into "but a complaining captive
with a sprained ankle" (12). But such statements about Tom's knowledge need to be read alongside evidence of Nancy's knowledge.24 And
Nancy does not just teach Tom, she travels herself.
The story opens with a section about Nancy's visit to Boston, which
is explained as an incidental and natural extension of a farmer's circuit
between home and market. She accompanies her uncle Ezra, who lives
in the hills just outside Boston, in his regular delivery of peaches from
his farm. A t first the danger of the unfamiliar city streets is raised, but
somewhat like in Harte's story, these initial misgivings are overcome:
the gruff Ezra forbids a trip to the theater but relents when he recognizes that a Maine girl is used to walking the four-and-a-half-mile distance between the depot and his home.25 While Ezra goes about his
business, Nancy becomes a tourist, and Tom her native guide. Together
Tom and Nancy tour Faneuil Hall, Charlestown, and other sights that
"thrill" her "patriotic heart" (13). Although Nancy can no longer tour
Boston when she grows old, her joy in society and movement continues
to lend her life meaning; when moralists chide her for thinking about
dancing on her deathbed, she cites David dancing before the Lord.
Thus the story portrays travel as ubiquitous and reciprocal—farmers
tour Boston, and college students tour Maine.
Folsom remarks that Jewett's empathic style "allows full expression
to what is, but implies stasis." For this reason, it "tends away from action, change, and the future" (89). But "The Life of Nancy" is all about
the changng relationship between East Rodney and Boston. The story is
93
remarkable in the degree to which it does not preserve East Rodney as it
was in the early days of Nancy and Tom's friendship. Hence it should
add to critics' understanding of the variation within Jewett's corpus.
The story is not focused on the urban elite and their ethically correct or
incorrect attitudes toward country people, it is focused on the colliding
of country and city. Some critics have praised Jewett's reading of New
England's historical change because she builds scenes of understanding
and non-invasive intimacy between essentially unlike people. In the
process, these critics have over-emphasized the degree to which Jewett's
unlikely friendships focus on dominant-subordinate relations between
an educated, mobile narrator and marginal, regional characters.26 By
praising Jewett's "ethical" relation to her characters, they construct
Jewett's characters into subordinate people, but in this story, Nancy is
not portrayed as subordinate. Like Jewett herself, Nancy is a regional
person with biographical and spiritual affiliation both inside and outside of high culture circles.
Louis Renza, Richard Brodhead, and Elizabeth Amnions fault Jewett
for hiding the presence of tourism and industry in her depiction of
place, but such a claim cannot be made about the writing by Harte and
Jewett discussed here.27 Neither is this writing reducible to what Amy
Kaplan provocatively calls "literary tourism" ("Nation" 252) because
there are differences as well as similarities between this writing and the
consolidation of national power. Harte and Jewett write about a practice of human relations between travelers and locals that characterized
their places and was in danger of passing away. During Harte's final
years in California, more people were visiting the West as prospective
residents, investors, health seekers, or tourists, and the most powerful of
these newcomers influenced the way strangers greeted each other on
the road or the way that residents made a living. Harte's sketches suggest that there are local stories that this modern traveler will not see
unless nature or faulty technology, which is always a natural force interfering with human plans, obliges them to look more carefully. In
"Miggles," Harte's in-between status and the contemporaneity of stagecoach travel—a staple of tourist routes in California into the 1880s—
are relatively hidden. But the story forces travelers into sociability with
other people's realities. It corrects traveler fantasies just as would a good
94
tourist guide. Jewett's story takes slow, personable travel into her present day. The story suggests that economically sophisticated tourist development may not prevent locals and travelers from having to understand each other. If travelers come back twenty years later, the locals
may have changed and they may have become interested in shaping
economic development. Like Harte's story, the story figures unequal social relations i n its portrayal of bodies; travelers' sore limbs are contrasted to more severe medical problems among the local residents.
Both stories celebrate values known then and now as feminine, but
in a wry rather than conventional way. T h e feminine is removed from
its customary role of redemption. The stories focus on the work and
self-compromise of women and others who are assigned the tasks of
making meals, shelter, or sociability. Harte's story reminds readers that
the people who make travel comfortable and possible are in danger of
being considered "loose," while Jewett removes the characters Nancy
and Addie from what might be construed as demeaning service roles.
Most disappointing to those travelers who expect sex as well as comfort, the women's romantic desire for someone other than the travelers,
and the women's ability to negotiate that relationship successfully, is
made clear. Both stories vacillate between a danger and seduction
script and a script more empowering for the female characters.
Harte and Jewett portrayed an activity of unplanned intimacies between strangers that they perceived to be nearly extinct, and therefore
twenty-first-century readers might think emergency hospitality can be
written off as yet another nineteenth-century activity that shifted from
an activity of necessity to recreation during these years. T h e experience
of emergency hospitality became commodified in their lifetimes, and
they contributed to its commodification. Yet commodification and economic development more generally are not monolithic. Hospitality was
commercial as well as sociable even in the nineteenth century, as documented by Paton Yoder's study of absentee tavern landlords and Dona
Brown's study of rural men and women working to attract city boarders.
The present-day bed and breakfast, clear ancestor of the boarding
house, has commodified the experience of intimacy between traveler
and host less ambiguously than Harte's and Jewett's writing did. British
Airways advertisements i n The New Yorker i n the 1990s tried to convince passengers that flying in the company's business class felt like a
return to the mother—a classic mother from the era of their youth—a
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message that elides both flight crews and travelers' real mothers.30 In
comparison to British Airways, Harte and Jewett are creative and
slightly subversive in their attempts to write a version of history in
which nature and other people's bodies impinge on travelers into the
present day. In Harte's and Jewett's lifetimes, unplanned intimacies during travel never became wholly a thing of the past; Harte slept in a
hayloft in a hamlet near the Wallenstadt Lake in Switzerland long after
any "frontier" had closed there, and he complained about it bitterly
(Nissen 176). In the twenty-first century, unscripted and uncommodifted human interactions continue to coexist with commercial interactions, in all countries, and it does not take a great deal of travel experience to know that such interactions rarely have the solitary effect of
shoring up a cosmopolitan sense of one's own superiority. In this regard
like the environmentalists of today, who are calling for sustainable
development rather than conservation alone (Short, Cohn-Bendit),
Harte and Jewett were trying to shape history not flee it.
University of Leicester
NOTES
For their help I wish to thank June Howard, Sara Eddy, Janice Koistinen-Harris,
Licia Calloway, Ralph Coury, Kelly Thomas, and Ian Leong.
1. I write both travelers and tourists because no firm line can be drawn between
the former (business travelers or economic migrants) and the latter (pleasure or
health seekers). Fifer's book on the West illustrates the fluidity of travel motives:
"whether traveling for pleasure, health, education, or part-business purposes, they
[travelers] were often also potential settlers or investors in the West"(5). As for the
moral distinction, first proposed by Fussell, between travelers who are independent
of commercialism and tourists who are mired within in it, I argue, after Buzard, that
the distinction is a class one. It emerged from the elite's reaction against the increasingly lower-class tourists who began to predominate in Europe and North
America after the American Civil War. Jewett and Harte are reacting against
lower-class tourists, but, as I will argue, not only from the position of a cultural
elite. O n the continuing popularity of Fussell's distinction outside of academia, see
Espey.
2. See Pattee; Brooks; Austin; Ziff 73-92, and less directly, Spiller et al. 843-6^.
3. One recent useful exception is Floyd.
4. Renza 56; Ammons; Brodhead.
5. Fifer's history of the tourism, information, and transport industries in the
West, and Dona Brown's history of the construction of New England demonstrate
that tourism cannot be studied separately from economic development.
96
6. See Fifer on the West; Dona Brown on New England and the Northeast;
Dunlop on the Midwest broadly defined, and Sears on the Northeast. Literary
scholars will recognize that these changes in eating, sleeping, and travel arrangements are also amply documented and commented upon by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Margaret Fuller, Bayard Taylor, Harriet Martineau, Maria Cummins, William Dean
Howells, Henry James, Isabella Bird, and Theodore Dreiser, but recent historical
accounts are more systematic than the writers in their discussions of finances and
class segregation, and hence I cite them instead.
7. Demars and Nash document similar battles between various social groups in
determining how Yosemite National Park would be run.
8. One telling exception is women homemakers, who take these opportunities
to learn about other people's domestic practices and sometimes to draw conclusions
about their level of civilization. Kirkland feels guilty when Pottawattamie Indians
show her gentle courtesy "though it was obvious that the visit, which inconvienced
them, could only have been caused by the most impertinent curiosity" (141). Eliza
Farnham admits to longing for rainstorms so that she can satisfy her curiosity about
how her less refined neighbors manage their households.
9. See Buzard 58 on cultured travelers' quest for the special, original experience
not found in guidebooks.
10. 1 say story and not motif to emphasize the aftermath, the way emergency
hospitality generates social narrative.
11. I say first published because Charles Johannigsmeier's work on newspaper
syndication of local color writing suggests that the audience of such stories was
much wider than scholars have typically accounted for. The stories were reprinted
in cheap newspapers across the country and abroad. See also Nissen 201-4,
Glazener 206-30. Harte's friend created the Overland Monthly to rival the Atlantic
Monthly and other Eastern magazines as a national vehicle of arts and letters; the
magazine's layout and contents (politics, anthropology, travel, fiction, and poetry)
were nearly identical to those of the Atlantic.
12. The narrator is female, but searches in Poole's Index to Periodical Literature,
the National U n i o n Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and nineteenth-century
editions of Who's Who in America yielded no information about the author, who
may be male or female.
13. Although Hoberman does not discuss de-centered theories of history, his
rereading of Welty's emergency hospitality story helped me think through this
point. O n "competing reality" as a motif of realism, see Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism.
14. One of the changes of the Gilded Age was that urban people ceased to rely
on neighborhood networks to build houses, deal with garbage, and provide public
safety (Wiebe 14). Frontier hospitality is fondly remembered because it differed
from the increasingly bureaucratic urban public services.
15. While investors came from many cities and countries, Fifer documents that
Bostonians and N e w Englanders (rather than New Yorkers or Chicagoans or
Philadelphians) were the most prominent as consumers, investors, entrepreneurs,
tour organizers, promoters, writers, and publicists (10).
97
16. See Letter 33; " O n an Extinct Public Institution"; "Notes by Flood and
Field"; "Stage-Coach Conversations"; " A Lonely Ride."
17. Buzard coins and conceptualizes the term ''token of acculturation" (157,
59) to denote experiences and objects valued by travelers as signs of their increasing cultural prestige, one of which was an evening spent in a peasant's cabin. A l though Buzard focuses on British and American travel in Europe, this aspect of his
analysis applies.
18. W i t h its group of disparate people who are brought closer together in the
face of a challenging environment, it resembles the film Stagecoach (1939). Harte's
story differs from the film in that its characters feel the lack of sympathy in their
group and temporarily regain it without the threat of marauding Indians. Following
Beebee's theory of generic instability, in which a text's ideology is most visible in its
vacillations between specific genres, then, one can say that Harte's story vacillates
ideologically between Westerns and local color fiction.
19. See for example Howells and Taylor.
20. She sent the first draft to Horace Scudder in November 1894, Letter to
Horace Scudder.
21. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' The Gates Ajar (1868) alludes to a young woman
hurt by a summer boarder's casual flirtation as a story so familiar that it need not be
elucidated; Jewett's novel A Marsh Island (1885) features a young man who nearly
proposes to the daughter of a farming family; and William Dean Howells' The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897) features the son of a country inn owner who fell in love
with a guest but only managed to marry her after her disastrous first marriage to a
dishonest Italian. The thwarted romance between Alma Leighton and Angus
Beaton in Howells' The Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) also counters convention.
They meet in St. Barnaby's, New Hampshire, where Beaton boards in Alma's
home. Although it is Beaton (callow urban aesthete) who spurns Alma (aspiring
provincial artist) when she arrives in New York City, it is Alma who finally rejects
Beaton.
22. O n the differences between country and city courtship and other socializing
among youth, see Freedman and D'Emilio 74-77. William Dean Howells fondly
writes in The Landlord at Lion's Head, that kissing and holding hands were more acceptable in the country than they were in the city.
23. This marginalization of the threat of seduction and self-abandonment
makes the story very different from the contemporaneous urban-rural romance text
of The Virginian (1902). Like Willa Cather in M7 Antonia, Jewett centers attention
on a regionalfigurebut avoids a romantic connection between the urbanized narrator and Antonia. For this reading of Cather and Wister, see John Murphy.
24. Writes Ammons, "These absences imply that in Dunnet there is no division
between home life and work life because there is no developed capitalist-based class
system with managers (the rich) and workers (the poor)—both of which by the
time Jewett wrote The Country of the Pointed Firs were standard features not only of
city life but also of small-town life" (84). O n the consumerist perspective of the
metropolitan narrator of Country, see also Foote, who reads the narrator as a consumer of Dunnet Landing who engages in acts (like looking through a window)
98
associated with urban realism and the city as the preeminent space of commodity
display. While perceptive, this argument equates consumerism with exploitation,
an equation "The Life of Nancy" seeks to mitigate.
25. N e w York Central and Hudson River Railroad C o . 134; Green Mountain
Railroad; Maine Central Railroad Company.
26. For example, she teaches all the academic subjects except Greek to a local
boy who attends Bowdoin College, the same college the New England writer
Nathaniel Hawthorne attended.
27. Just as the sprained ankle helped Tom socialize with country youth o n their
terms, a traffic jam stops the wagon long enough for Nancy and Tom to obtain U n cle Ezra's permission.
28. For example, the entry on Jewett in Fetterley and Pryse's anthology of
women regionalists characterizes Jewett's relation to her characters as an ethical
dilemma: "how can she [Jewett] portray the lives of regional people without betraying them? H o w can she create the conditions necessary for silent persons to speak
their secrets without writing fiction that will 'stuff' her characters and put them in
a sideshow for gawkers to mock?" (186). Dona Brown's analysis of poor N e w England women's role in promoting tourism indicates that New England women were
not entirely silent.
29. Nor in other stories by Jewett, including " A Late Supper" and " A n Everyday Girl."
30. T h e first ad, "The new Club World cradle seat. Lullaby not included" (5
Feb. 1996:3), features a black and white photograph of a young white woman holding a baby in her arms. Her hair is in a modest 1950s wave, and she is wearing a simple sweater and a single strand of pearls. The baby's head is replaced by a color shot
of the head of a portly fifty-something white business man leaning against the blue
airline seat. A few months later, a similar ad designed around a black business man
and his own classic childhood appeared ("The new Club World seat. A huge improvement" [11 March 1996:8]). Both ads seek to reinforce the symbolic maleness
of all travelers from the nineteenth century to the present and the symbolic femaleness of the people in the hospitality industry.
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Travel Delays in the Commercial Countryside with Bret Harte and

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